In the field of underground excavators for performing tunnel excavation to bury underground water pipes, gas pipes or the like, various controlling apparatuses have been developed to automatically advance the excavation work in accordance with a planned line of execution. As one of controlling apparatuses of this type, one disclosed in Japanese Patent Application No. 332891/1991 is known, wherein, in an auger-type excavator of a single-process construction method having actuators for direction correction, a soil condition is inputted in advance, and the actuators are controlled by means of fuzzy inference based on the inputted value and measured values of a positional offset, an offset angle, thrust, and the like of the excavator.
However, the type of soil where the excavator is advanced is not actually fixed and consecutively changes as the excavator is advanced. For this reason, if the actuators are controlled primarily on the basis of the inputted soil condition the precision of advancing deteriorates, and there are cases where advancing itself becomes impossible. Accordingly, it is desired to develop an apparatus capable of coping with the soil condition which constantly changes, by ascertaining the consecutively changing soil condition by using the inputted soil condition strictly as an initial value, and by controlling the actuators on the basis of the ascertained soil condition. A first aspect of the present invention has this as an object.
In addition, when the excavator is automatically operated, in light of improvement of the reliability of the apparatus, it is required to be able to cope speedily with a failure or the like by conducting a self-diagnostic check of the failure or the like of each portion of the system. In the conventional practice, however, the situation has been merely such that start-up inspection prior to the operation is conducted at best. Yet, the more complicated the system of the excavator becomes, the more the failure or the like occurs in each stage of operation including a stage prior to a start-up, and the details of the failure or the like differ depending on each stage of operation. An object of a second aspect of the present invention is to make it possible to display a self-diagnostic check for each stage of operation and the details of the check, and to perform the check appropriately and speedily, thereby remarkably improving the reliability.
Furthermore, data on execution by the excavator is in many cases stored in a backup memory so that its contents will not be lost even in the case of a power failure or the like. In this case, as a method of its storage, it is desirable to ensure that the essential operating efficiency will not be impaired. A third aspect of the present invention is aimed at providing a method of storage which is suited to an auger-type excavator of a single-process construction method.